Like all professional criminals, Argentine Rodolfo José Lohrman Krenz has an alias, The Russianand many false identities. He also has a body strengthened in prison with Spartan discipline and a brilliant head for languages, robberies and escapes. His background is mixed with the facts and myths typical of mafia bosses. Lohrmann’s gangs robbed, kidnapped, extorted and sometimes killed in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Ecuador. When he settled in Europe he specialized again in bank and armored vehicle hits.
In a long letter published in 2019 in the Argentine newspaper Clarion,The Russian boasted of being a global criminal: “The list of countries I have visited exceeds 50 destinations. It must be taken into account that I did not return to Argentina for 13 years. I speak Portuguese and German perfectly. I can get by, and a lot, with French, English, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian. In Europe I also lived and robbed in Lithuania, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro, Moldova and Slovakia, among others. I was even in Asia and Africa. I stole everywhere.” He also spent time in Spain, where he served a four-year sentence in a prison in Valencia and had a relationship with an inmate, according to his story.
For years he was the most wanted Argentine by Interpol and the hope of the family of Cristian Schaerer, the 21-year-old student who vanished near his house in Corrientes in 2003, to find out his whereabouts. Despite the fact that the family paid 277,000 dollars (about 250,000 euros) for the ransom, the young man was not found, either alive or dead. None of those convicted of the crime gave any clues about what happened and the family hoped that El Ruso, when he was extradited to Argentina, would be able to give details to end an uncertainty that has dragged on for more than a decade. That hope was dashed last Saturday, September 7, with the escape of Lohrman, now 59 years old, from the Vale de Judeus prison, in Alcoentre, 65 kilometers from Lisbon.
The escape with four other inmates was successful due to its meticulous chronological planning – it was done during visiting hours – and the study of the weaknesses of the system, which the Minister of Justice, Rita Alarcão Júdice, herself admitted were serious and which have already cost the resignation of the director general of Penitentiary Institutions, Rui Abrunhosa. Otherwise, it was a classic escape with sheets, ropes and two ladders supplied from outside by three accomplices, who even managed to access the first enclosure of the prison without being detected by the guards. The cameras recorded the moment of the escape without alerting anyone. To make things easier, Vale de Judeus does not have watchtowers. “In 2017, the most erroneous measure was taken, which was to dismantle the four towers that allowed 80% of the premises to be monitored and to provide complete peripheral vision,” laments Frederico Morais, president of the National Union of the Corps of Penitentiary Guards, by telephone.
NATIONAL POLICE
Photos of Rodolfo José Lohrmann, the Portuguese Fábio Santos Loureiro and Fernando Ribeiro Ferreira, the Georgian Shergili Farjiani and the British Mark Cameron Roscaleer with the words Wanted have already been displayed on Spanish police posters since Wednesday, a day after the European arrest warrant was issued. Several had a history of escape attempts in other prisons, including El Ruso. Morais also does not understand why, despite the warning signs, they were allowed to coincide in prison hours and have enough time to plan their escape.
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A “movie escape”
It is likely that El Ruso began to think about escaping from the day he entered a Portuguese prison in 2016. Rodolfo Lohrman likes to boast about his trips as well as his escapes: he maintains that he made a “film-like” escape in Bulgaria in 2011 and another disappearance in Spain during a prison leave in 2005. The truth is that in order to escape a week ago he first had to get himself transferred, on March 6, to the Vale de Judeus prison from Portugal’s maximum security prison, Monsanto, where 50 dangerous prisoners are held, who spend most of the day incommunicado and who only interact during yard hours with inmates selected by the management, according to prison sources.
The Argentinean managed to get a court to authorize his change of security regime to common despite the opposition of the reports of the technicians and those responsible for the prison. And Lohrmann thus left “the little Portuguese Guantanamo”, as he described it in the letter of Clarionwhere he played chess and cards, read, ran more than five miles and did hundreds of sit-ups every day. To protest against this regime, he went on two hunger strikes in 2018 and 2019 and, despite an escape attempt, a court agreed to ease his situation.
“As an impression: he is a professional criminal. A guy who loves being a criminal, and will never stop being one. He doesn’t steal out of necessity. He steals because he is a thief. It is his essence. Just as we need to write, he needs to steal. Most thieves his age have moved into drug trafficking. He says he is a thief and will die a thief. He doesn’t see drug dealing as an option,” explains by email Argentine journalist Nahuel Gallota, the recipient of the 40-page letter published in Clarion“I think he is very dangerous but also very intelligent. He knows when to use violence. I don’t imagine him killing, but he could kill if they surround him,” he says.
In his letter, Rodolfo Lohrmann told him what he wanted to tell him: his happy childhood and his slide towards the dark side. There is no original trauma that explains his fondness for crime. He was a child who played football, learned to fish, speak German and drive trucks. In championships of the card game truco he met a player who introduced him to a new world. He was 15 years old when he took up his first gun and assaulted a truckload of stolen cows.
After being arrested for the first time in 1985, his contact list expanded in prison, where he met the people who would later join his first gangs. They specialized in hitting banks, supermarkets, shops and armored vehicles in different Latin American countries. When the corralito was installed in Argentina and people began to keep their savings at home, he changed his strategy. He created a group to carry out kidnappings and collect ransoms, which did not always end in the release of the victims, as in the case of Cristian Schaerer.
El Ruso then disappeared from the Argentine police radar. Some news reports implicated him in the 2004 kidnapping of Cecilia Cubas, the daughter of the former president of Paraguay, Raúl Cubas, who appeared in a mass grave five months later, but the Paraguayan justice system would end up condemning several members of the Patria Libre Party, a far-left group, for this crime. The rumours about Lohrmann began: that he had died, turned to drug trafficking or altered his face with cosmetic surgery. But no. In 2016 he reappeared in Portugal, arrested for five bank and jewellery robberies under the name José Luis Guevara Martínez. Three more months passed before his true identity emerged. Shortly afterwards a court sentenced him to 18 years and 10 months in prison for eight crimes, including criminal association, robbery, possession of weapons, forgery and money laundering.
Argentina requested his extradition for a kidnapping committed on October 5, 2004, which is described in the ruling of the Lisbon Court of Appeals that ruled on the request. El Ruso and two accomplices got out of their car armed to kidnap a woman who was traveling on a motorcycle in Baradero, in the province of Buenos Aires. They grabbed her by the hair and put her in the car with tinted windows. That same day they called the victim’s husband to demand a ransom. Six days later the kidnappers collected the payment in cash and gold jewelry from under a truck parked in the town of San Miguel and released the woman.
In 2018, the Portuguese court granted the extradition, but imposed a condition: it could only be carried out after Lohrmann had served his sentence in Portugal. The Russian decided to stop opposing the extradition. “He was doomed. I think he had 15 years left on his sentence in Portugal, and he has extradition requests from Argentina and a couple of other countries. So he would spend the rest of his life in prison,” says Nahuel Gallota. A week ago he managed to escape from prison again, while Cristian Schaerer’s family saw their hope of knowing the fate of their son fade away.
